Politics

Over the hum of laptops and the persistent, attention-demanding chirps of a hundred BlackBerrys, the Minority Media & Telecom Council convened its “Broadband and Social Justice Summit” in Washington, D.C., last week, a gathering of industry and government leaders, to discuss how broadband access and adoption can help bridge the digital divide and provide minority…

After his inaugural address; his first State of the Union; his speeches in Philadelphia, Denver, Springfield and Oslo; and the 2004 Democratic convention speech, during which he proclaimed “there’s not a liberal America and a conservative America; there’s the United States of America,” everybody knows that President Barack Obama can give a great speech. If…

Never mind the model of the “Tiger Mother,” Amy Chua’s controversial version of tough parental love pushing sometimes reluctant children to heights of achievement. Marian Wright Edelman’s hopes are far more basic. The founder of the Children’s Defense Fund has always been a fighter. In the week during which the country celebrated the achievements of…

The core leadership of the Atlanta-based Southern Christian Leadership Conference insists that it was not blindsided by today’s news that Martin Luther King Jr.’s daughter Bernice is turning down the presidency of the organization that her father co-founded back in 1957. “We have not been leadership-less, and we still are not leadership-less,” Dr. Howard Creecy…

Michael Steele, former chairman of the Republican National Committee, recently went on Chris Matthews’ MSNBC show and chatted, among other things, about the lack of blacks in the Republican Party. “We could have used a few more brothers in the house; there’s no doubt about that,” Steele said when Matthews made the ingenious and original…

By Eugene Robinson This whole health-care thing isn’t quite working out the way Republicans planned. My guess is that they’ll soon try to change the subject — but I’m afraid they’re already in too deep. Wednesday’s vote to repeal President Obama’s health insurance reform law was supposed to be a crowning triumph. We heard confident…

Today marks the second anniversary of Barack Obama’s inauguration, and his administration is officially looking forward. To 2012, that is. The New York Times reports that Obama plans to close the Office of Political Affairs at the White House and restructure to prepare for the 2012 election. Also, in a first for a sitting president,…

Few things are more infuriating than when people lecture African Americans on where we should fall on rights-related issues because we’ve been oppressed and ought to know better — as if we owe a debt for our freedom that can only be repaid by signing on to their point of view, without going through the…

Today is the midpoint of Barack Obama’s first term as president of the United States of America. When scholars look back at this moment a century from now, what will they make of it? They, of course, will have the advantage of knowing facts about which we can only speculate, starting with whether Obama was…